When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.